All This Talk of Civil War, and Now This Carnage. Coincidence?

by Robert Fisk

Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard
a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.

Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida
is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation
authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a
letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a
Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken
up this theme. Civil war.

Somehow I don't believe it. No, I don't believe the Americans were behind
yesterday's carnage despite the screams of accusation by the Iraqi
survivors yesterday. But I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think
that their own actions might produce what the Americans want: a fear of
civil war so intense that Iraqis will go along with any plan the United
States produces for Mesopotamia.

I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among
France's Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the
French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim which led
to half a million dead souls.

And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland and the bombings in Dublin and
Monaghan in 1974, . . .

It's not that I believe al-Qa'ida incapable of such a bloodbath. But I ask
myself why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing so hard. Let's
turn the glass round the other way. If a violent Sunni movement wished to
evict the Americans from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement
fighting very cruelly to do just that - why would it want to turn the Shia
population of Iraq, 60 per cent of Iraqis, against them? The last thing
such a resistance would want is to have the majority of Iraqis against it. . . .

But an occupation authority which should regard civil war as the last
prospect it ever wants to contemplate, keeps shouting "civil war" in our
ears and I worry about that. Especially when the bombs make it real.